I don't like John Wyndham.

This may seem a bit of a random pronouncement but trut me, I've been thinking about this. Not for long, admittedly, and while overdosing on quite brutal tiredness and sore feet (my new plan to save money and get in shape at the same time by walking everywhere that I can walk to within about half an hour from home does, I admit, have some drawbacks) but still - thinking about this.

Now, no offense to everyone who does like John Wyndham but to my thinking his novels are what happen when interesting plots meet bad - or at least phenomenally boring - writing.

I read The Chrysalids while sitting round at my parents' house, bored out of my mind. The book didn't make it much better. I read the whole thing because the plot was good, but in spite of this I was resolutely un-gripped by the actual prose. It was a good story, but to my mind it was a good story which was told in a rather dull way, perhaps because it was seen through the eyes of a rather dull - I might even say characterless - perspective character. Sure, he had Speshul Powers of Speshulness™ and was living in a rather fascinating post-apocalyptic religious community, but he didn't seem to have much in the way of a personality. I can't even remember his name. David? Thomas? Johnathan?

Personally, I wouldn't have pegged the hero of The Chrysalids as the next step on the evolutionary ladder because he was, qute frankly, boring. I only knew he was supposed to be special and interesting because the book kept mentioning it.

I hate informed attributes.

I flipped through The Midwitch Cuckoos at the charity shop I volunteer in, Thursdays being very very boring and this Thursday being no exception. I'd heard of it, I'd heard it was supposed to be a very good piece of speculative fiction, I decuided to give it a chance - maybe my lack of interest in The Chrysalids was more my problem than Wyndham's - picked it up on spec and I was bored again.

Perhaps it was no surprise to realize that once again, here was an interesting story told in a boring way. The main character was, once again, quite frightfully dull - and, unlike what's-his-name in The Chrysalids, he only seemed to have a very tenuous connection to the plot as a whole. The book was full of more interesting people doing more interesting things and here we were lumbered with a protagonist who seemed to have nothing to do with anything and no real connection to events save for living in the same town.

That wasn't what really annoyed me, though. The annoying part was that I felt positively offended on behalf of my whole gender by the patronizing, paternalistic attitude both characters and author displayed to pretty much every single female character in the novel.

Just in case anyone is unfamiliar with The Midwitch Cuckoos, the plot involves the entire fertile female population of a small English village falling spontaneously pregnant with Alien Babies of Massive Creepy. It's a story in which most of the really severe physical and emotional consequences of the Resident Plot Contrivance happen to women and it's told exclusively from the perspective of men. An odd decision, and one which doesn't seem to have a lot of logic behind it. Yes, maybe Wyndham wanted his detatched narrator - problem is, the detatched narrator is a large part of what makes the book, in spite of its interesting plot, rather boring.

Anyway. Women, in this book, are (in the eyes of the male perspective characters) superstitious, hysterical, dependent, unthinking, largely undifferentiated and unable to cope with unpleasant truths. The male characters conduct several earnest discussions about whether or not they should trouble the little ladies with their horrible suspicions about these pregnancies or just let the village women carry on thinking they all just so happened to end up naturally pregnant at the exact same time, even the chastely secluded widows and the equally chastely secluded virgins. Because of course their poor pregnancy-addled female brains would be unable to draw any sensible conclusions themselves without some tackle-packing bearer of the Almighty Y Chromosome to set them on the right track.

This in spite of the fact that, um, it's the ladies what got knocked up, guys. They should be quite capable of working out that Something Ain't Right About These Coincidental Pregnancies without some guy having to come along and tell them. They're the ones who are pregnant. Women, believe it or not Mr. Excessively Boring Narrator, do have functional brains.

This, not so coincidentally, is the point I started very definitely skim-reading (and very nearly gave up in disgust altogether).

I nearly gave up again when, after the Babies of Massive Creepy were born, even the staunchly child-free were presented as wavering in the face of the joys of motherhood. Because it's absolutely impossible for a woman to say she doesn't want to have children and actually mean it and all it takes is an alien rape baby to set them right - and God forbid they actually try and do anything about said unwanted pregnancies or alien babies without being talked into it by one of the men.

The sixty-odd so-called 'Cuckoos' these poor women ended up giving birth to turned out to be a gestalt entity, or at least that's what I took away from it; I may not have been entirely correct, but I was getting so creeped out and annoyed by the condescending, paternalistic attitude displayed to the female characters I wasn't in the mood to read closer. This might have been slightly more disturbing if it wasn't for the fact that Wyndham - or at least his narrator - had been treating the village women as barely more differentiated than their creepy clone babies. I'd like to believe, if only for the sake of my own faith in humanity, that this was intentional and treat the whole novel as a thinly-disguised polemic on Women's Rights, but I just ain't that hopeful...

And am I the only one who thinks he has a serious problem with dangling characters?